Greek Legacy

Contributions of Ancient Greeks

Ancient Greece was a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity (c. 600 AD). Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era.

Classical Greek culture, especially philosophy, had a powerful influence on the Roman Empire, which carried a version of it to many parts of the Mediterranean Basin and Europe. For this reason Classical Greece is generally considered to be the seminal culture which provided the foundation of modern Western culture and is considered as the cradle of Western civilization

Brief History of Ancient Greece

Greek people were very interested in science as a way of organizing the world and making order out of chaos, and having power over some very powerful things like oceans and weather. From about 600 BC, a lot of rich, educated Greek men spent time observing the planets and the sun and trying to figure out how astronomy worked. They got their first lessons from the Babylonians, who were very good at astronomy and also very interested in it.

The ideas and achievements of the ancient Greeks changed their world and still affect us today. Philosophers such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle formulated ideas about how the world worked. Artists tried to find more natural and realistic ways of representing the world. Doctors, like Hippokrates, started to look for rational reasons for the causes of illness and disease.

Top 10 Philosophers of All Time

What is the meaning of life? What should I do with my work? Where are we going as a society? What is love? Most of us have these questions in our minds at some point (often in the middle of the night), but we despair of trying to answer them.

But these questions matter deeply because only with sound answers to them can we direct our energies meaningfully.

Philosophers are people unafraid of the large questions. They have, over the centuries, asked the very largest. They realise that these questions can always be broken down into more manageable chunks and that the only really pretentious thing is to think one is above regularly raising simple questions.

What is Philosophy for?

Philosophy gets us to submit all aspects of common sense to reason. It wants us to think for ourselves, to be more independent. Is it really true what people say about love, about money, about children, about travel, about work? Philosophers are interested in asking whether an idea is logical – rather than simply assuming it must be right because it is popular and long-established. The term "philosophy" means, "love of wisdom." Philosophy is an activity people undertake when they seek to understand basic truths about themselves, the world in which they live, and their relationships to the world and to each other.

Socrates was born in 470 B.C., in Athens, Greece. He developed logical methods for deciding whether something was true or not. He is the philosopher credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy. Socrates has become renowned for his contribution to the field of ethics.

Socrates believed that one must concentrate more on self development than on material things. He encouraged people to develop friendships and love amongst themselves. Humans possess certain basic philosophical or intellectual virtues and those virtues were the most valuable of all possessions. To act Good and to be truly Good from within is different and virtue relates to the Goodness of the soul.

Socrates believed fervently in the immortality of the soul, and he was convinced that the gods had singled him out as a kind ofdivine emissary to persuade the people of Athens that their moral values were wrong-headed, and that, instead of being so concerned with their families, careers, and political responsibilities, they ought to be worried about the "welfare of their souls". However, he also questioned whether "arete" (or "virtue") can actually be taught as the Sophists believed. Sophists were teachers who traveled from place to place teaching education to the children of the wealthy.

Socrates - Encyclopedia channel

Pythagoras - Greek philosopher, mathematician, astronomer...

By the 400s BC, Pythagoras was interested in finding the patterns and rules in mathematics and music, and invented the idea of a mathematical proof. Although Greek women usually were not allowed to study science, Pythagoras did have some women among his students.

Beginning around 450 BC, about the same time as Pythagoras, Hippocrates and other Greek doctors wrote medical texts. Greek doctors tried to figure out a scientific theory that explained diseases. They thought if you were sick you had too much or too little of four basic substances: blood, black bile, yellow bile, or phlegm (boogers). That wasn't right, but it sounded scientific. Doctors in India and China had similar ideas, but maybe a little later.

Plato (427/347 BC) was a philosopher and mathematician in Classical Greece, and the founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Heo is one of the world's best known and most widely pivotal figure in the development of philosophy, especially in Western tradition. He was the student of Socrates and the teacher of Aristotle, and he wrote in the middle of the fourth century B.C.E. in ancient Greece. Though influenced primarily by Socrates, to the extent that Socrates is usually the main character in many of Plato's writings, he was also influenced by Heraclitus, Parmenides, and the Pythagoreans.

PHILOSOPHY - Plato

Aristotle lived from 384-342 B.C. was born in Stagirus, a now extinct Greek colony and seaport on the coast of Thrace. He and other philosophers at the Lyceum and the Academy in Athens worked on observing plants and animals, and organizing the different kinds of plants and animals into types. Aristotle's work was yet another way of creating order out of chaos.

Aristotle is a towering figure in ancient Greek philosophy, making contributions to logic, metaphysics, mathematics, physics, biology, botany, ethics, politics, agriculture, medicine, dance and theatre. He was a student of Plato who in turn studied under Socrates. He was more empirically-minded than Plato or Socrates and is famous for rejecting Plato's theory of forms.

Archimedes of Syracuse ( 287 BC – c. 212 BC) was an Ancient Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor, and astronomer. Some say he was the most intelligent mathematician of all time.

Because people in ancient Greece had only very clumsy ways of writing down numbers, they didn't like algebra. They found it very hard to write down equations or number problems. Instead, Greek mathematicians were more focused on geometry, and used geometric methods to solve problems that you might use algebra for. Greek mathematicians were also very interested in proving that certain mathematical ideas were true. So they spent a lot of time using geometry to prove that things were always true, even though people like the Egyptians andBabylonians already knew that they were true most of the time anyway.

The real story behind Archimedes’ Eureka!

Greek people in general were very interested in rationality, in things making sense and hanging together. They wanted to tie up the loose ends. They liked music, because music followed strict rules to produce beauty. So did architecture, and so did mathematics.

People in ancient Greece had a variety of different ways of writing down numbers, but none of them was very efficient. (And of course different Greek city-states used somewhat different systems, too).

Some Greeks used a system based on writing the first letter of the word for that number. Like in Greek you say Ten “Deka”, so they would draw a D to mean 10. (A delta, actually, in the Greek alphabet). In this system though,1 was just written with a vertical line, like our 1 today. They used P for Pente (five), D for deka (ten), H for Hekaton (100), X for Xhilioi (1000), and M for Murioi (10,000). So you could write 539 as HHHHHDDDPIIII. But this was pretty hard to read.

To make it a little easier, Greek writers also combined these symbols to make special symbols for 50, 500, 5000, and 50,000.

The Greeks also used another system where the letters of the Greek alphabet each stood for a number, so 1 was alpha (A), 2 was beta (B), 3 was gamma (G) and so forth. (The letters in the Greek alphabet were not in exactly the same order as in English).

They did this for the first ten letters, and then the 11th letter stood for 20, the 12th letter stood for 30, the 13th letter stood for 40, and so on. After 100 the next letter stood for 200 and so forth. This system was more efficient to write. For larger numbers people drew a line over or under or next to the alpha to mean a thousand, or whatever, or over the beta to mean 2000.

But none of these systems was any good for adding or multiplying long strings of numbers, like if you wanted to keep accounts in a store. For that, the number system of India(invented around 600 AD) was much better - the system we use today is based on that. Nowadays we only use Greek numbers, or Greek letters, to symbolize an unknown inalgebra.